Digital Social Innovation

Digital Social Innovation (DSI) is an emerging approach in social innovation that leverages digital tools to address societal and environmental challenges. This goal is pursued by fostering synergies between the public, private, and third sector, as well as by engaging citizens as co-creators of solutions. The DSI vision originates from the increasing dissatisfaction and distrust with conventional top-down, techno-centric models of social innovation, which have shown weak responsiveness to people's needs. Within DSI, individuals are recognized as carriers of a wealth of (tacit) knowledge and experience that can be explicited to understand social needs better, identify expectations, and assess the effectiveness of novel services. Social media and online collaboration platforms can play a crucial role in unlocking this implicit knowledge by allowing citizens to propose or inspire new solutions to societal challenges directly. Peter Baeck, head of collaborative economy research at NESTA (a British-based non-for profit innovation foundation), describes DSI as follows: “Just as digital platforms are changing how we work, shop and have fun, there's a new opportunity for communities to become a part of decision making processes and tackle social challenges. Technology is being used to mobilise the crowd, pool resources and engage the creativity of the general public. We call this phenomenon Digital Social Innovation.” ¹ As this definition suggests, DSI stands at the intersection of three elements: the innovation process, the social world, and the digital ecosystem. The social dimension reminds us that the focus of innovation is not technology in itself. Rather, technology is seen as a mean to address relevant social challenges. The concept of innovation refers to the generation of solutions that are more effective, sustainable, and ethically appropriate than existing ones. Finally, the digital component emphasizes the potential benefits of integrating emerging technologies (i.e., social computing platforms, the Internet of Things, robotic, artificial intelligence, etc.) in social services.

From a technological standpoint, openness—that is, open knowledge, open software, open data, and open hardware—is the “mantra” of DSI. The underlying assumption is that open and scalable digital tools can promote a participatory culture and foster the proactive involvement of end users in the DSI process. This is why NESTA is jointly developing with the European Union a research project entitled “Digital Social Innovation for Europe” (https://digitalsocial.eu/) with the aim of further understanding the potential of digital social innovation and fostering efforts of people and organizations interested in this approach. These users can leverage on the project's Web platform to showcase their work; explore the DSI community and create potential synergies with other partners; and identify sources of funding to support their initiatives. As reported on the project's Web site, all of the data on the digitalsocial.eu platform are open and accessible, and all the source code behind the platform is available open-source on GitHub.